Fall Falling Leaves Moon
Another box. Carpet. 160 yards of a champagne colored floor covering that we may never walk on. Weird. At Hamernick’s Decorating in St. Paul we walked across the street from their main showrooms to another Hamernick’s building. This one, instead of aisles filled with flooring samples and fabric books, had stacked rolls of carpet. It would have made Harun al-Rashid comfortable.
Though there were more rows in the back, the front had two rows of carpet still attached to the cardboard rolls from the mills. Both rows were over my head in height which meant there were carpet rolls buried beneath as many four and five other rolls. Each row was probably 30 feet long. How did they get the bottom ones out, I wondered?
There was the answer. Near the open back door a man got onto an ordinary forklift with an unordinary front attachment, a long round metal probe, the exact length of the carpet rolls, drove it over and deftly picked up a fat roll. A worker there said he could get at any roll in “under 10 minutes.” Then, looking at the precarious portions of the two nearby rows stacked up against the far concrete wall, he amended that, “Well, maybe not those.”
Afterward Kate and I had lunch at Mai Village on University Avenue. While we waited for our food, I told Kate the story of the owners who flew Vietnamese carpenters in to build the interior. It’s a marvelous feat of woodcraft with delicate light sconces and elegant open screens, thick pillars, an interior roof over tables each with bamboo lengths carved from dark wood along the table edge. Each chair at the tables has an open back, again carved.
Later, on the way home, discussing what we would miss about the Twin Cities I used that story as an example. “I’ll miss,” I said, “the thick network of memories and concrete places, a network woven over 40 years. Like the story of Mai Village this network is idiosyncratic to these cities. But, part of the fun will be building a new network in Denver.”